For racing games our racer of choice continues to be DiRT, which is now in its 3rd iteration. Codemasters uses the same EGO engine between its DiRT, F1, and GRID series, so the performance of EGO has been relevant for a number of racing games over the years.

DiRT3 is a game that greatly benefitted from AMD’s GCN architecture, rocketing the 7900 series cards to the top of our charts and giving a similar boost to the 7800 series. Compared to the 6970 the 7870 is an incredible 30% faster at 1920, an impressive showing when we are generally only expecting the 7870 to match the 6970’s performance. The 7850 brings us back down to earth however, with a much more modest 10% lead.

Meanwhile compared to NVIDIA’s cards, the 7800 series lead isn’t nearly as large here as NVIDIA has historically done well at DiRT 3. The 7870 enjoys a 9% lead over the GTX 570 here, while the 7850 is virtually tied with the GTX 560 Ti.

"The icing on the graphics cake is that the X51 is the first instance of desktop Optimus we've seen. That's right: you can actually plug your monitor into the IGP's HDMI port and the tower will power down the GPU when it's not in use. This implementation functions just like the notebook version does, and it's a welcome addition."

Wrong. Read a review.....The bigger issue will be the orientation of the PCIe Power Connector I expect. I have a tightly spaced HTPC that currently uses a GTX 570 HD from EVGA because it was the best card I could fit in the Antec Fusion enclosure. If the PCIe power plugs were facing out the side of the card and not the back I would have not been able to use it. I expect the same consideration will apply to the even smaller X51Reply

EA really screwed AMD over with Battlefield 3. There's basically no reason to consider a Radeon card if you plan on heavily playing BF3, especially since most other games like Skyrim, Star Wars, Rage, etc, all run excellent on any $200+ card, with anything $300+ being simply overkill.

The obvious best card for Battlefield 3 is a Geforce GTX 560 TI 448 Cores for $250-$280, basically identical in performance to the GTX570 in BF3. Even those on a budget would be better served with a low-end GTX560 series card unless you run resolutions above 1920x1200.

If I were AMD, I'd concentrate on increasing Battlefield 3 performance with driver tweaks, because it's obvious their architecture is superior to nVidia's, but these 'exclusive' titles are tainted.Reply

BF3 isn't an Nvidia "exclusive", they made sure to remain vendor agnostic and participate in both IHV's vendor programs. No pointing the finger and crying foul on this game, it just runs better on Nvidia hardware but I do agree it should be running better than it does on this new gen of AMD hardware.

In the reviews here SHOGUN 2 total war is said to be the very hardest on hardware, and Nvidia wins that - all the way to the top.--So on the most difficult game, Nvidia wins.Certainly other factors are at play on these amd favored games like C1 and M2033 and other amd optimized games.--Once again, on the MOST DIFFICULT to render Nvidia has won.Reply